The face of King Tut goes from death mask to computer generated image of the boy king on the Discovery Channel’s "The Assassination of King Tut."

The face of King Tut goes from death mask to computer generated image of the boy king on the Discovery Channel’s "The Assassination of King Tut."

Photo: / Discovery Channel

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The first pyramid, King Djoser's Step Pyramid, was erected more than 4,500 years ago at Saqqara, a massive desert necropolis on the edge of the Nile Valley.

The first pyramid, King Djoser's Step Pyramid, was erected more than 4,500 years ago at Saqqara, a massive desert necropolis on the edge of the Nile Valley.

Photo: / PBS

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TV's 'Pyramid Scheme' comes up dry

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A few millenia from now, when archeologists are blowing the dust off artifacts in the sub-basement of the Museum of Television & Radio, I'm convinced they'll come across a TV programmer's manual with a chapter titled, "When in Doubt, Do Something on Egypt."

The chapter will point out how audiences seem to lap up anything to do with pyramids, pharaohs, mummies, sarcophagi, embalming unguents and digging in the desert. It will advise that putting the word "lost" in the program's title, as in "The Lost House Keys of Ramses the Great" or "Ptolemy's Lost Ptunic," is worth several ratings points. And it will extol the virtues of cramming into two hours a load of material that normally would fill 20 minutes.

These guidelines are assiduously followed in three specials airing this week, all of which have interesting information to share but all of which could have used ruthless editors, too.

The best of the bunch is "Egypt Eternal: The Quest for Lost Tombs," a National Geographic PBS special airing Wednesday at 8 p.m. on KCTS/9. It's the best because it's the shortest - only an hour long. But, like most specials on Egypt, it blithely proceeds on the assumption that desecrating someone's burial chamber in the name of scholarship is perfectly acceptable behavior. No one ever seems to ask: At what point is it OK to disturb or remove valuables from a person's tomb? After a year? A hundred years? A thousand?

I'm waiting for someone to prove his familial connection to an Egyptian king and then sue the pants off everyone involved in invading Uncle Pharaoh's final resting place. (The ensuing two-hour special will no doubt air on Court TV.)

Possibly because TV has already run out of pharaohs to exhume, this week's National Geographic program centers on the unearthing of high rollers who could afford to build lavish tombs in the manner of royalty, but weren't royalty themselves. One, it would seem, was King Tut's wet nurse. As Dave Barry would say, I'm not making this up. Ostensibly, the excavation of these tombs tells us that rich and well-connected people in ancient Egypt had fancier funerals than the poor and disconnected. Imagine that!

A key player in "Egypt Eternal," as he is in most specials on Egyptian archeology, is Zahi Hawass, director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. As if to give his blessing, Hawass also appears briefly in "The Assassination of King Tut," a thoroughly annoying piece of conjecture that premiered last night on Discovery Channel and repeats Saturday at noon and next Monday at 9 p.m. If anything, it's a reminder that appearances by Hawass shouldn't be considered an assurance of fine programming.

Scholars have long thought that Tutankhamen, who died at the age of 18, might have been murdered. The Discovery special, a two-hour combination of modern forensic investigation and historical re-creation (think "CSI: The Nile") purports to prove that Tut was whacked by one of his closest advisers, yet it does no such thing. It features two former cops from Utah -- again, I'm not making this up -- going through all the rigors of a murder investigation, right down to examining X-rays of Tut's skull and his family history. Based on the flimsiest circumstantial evidence this side of "The Practice," they conclude that Tut was indeed iced, even though he wasn't the healthiest kid in the world and, according to one expert, may have died from a bug bite.

I won't say who gets implicated in this allegedly nefarious plot because that would be almost as irresponsible as a network passing hypothesis off as fact. But Discovery seemed to know early on that "The Assassination of King Tut" was a loser. Why else would it incorporate into the program a seemingly unrelated effort to come up with one of those computerized models of what Tut looked like, based on skull measurements and such?

The result is a cross between Daryl "Chill" Mitchell and Forest Whitaker, but Tut's perceived likeness has nothing to do with the show other than to serve as a tease to stay tuned through two interminable hours of smoke-and-mirror speculation.

Similarly, a program called "The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt," airing tomorrow at 9 p.m. on A&E, uses a storytelling come-on to keep the viewer from bolting after the first five minutes. Anyone who does stay put deserves a medal, and should be checked immediately for signs of life.

The device is a common one: placing two different stories on parallel tracks and going back and forth from one to the other. In the right hands, it's a compelling tool. Done badly, it's blatant audience manipulation.

In this case, story one centers on some young scientists looking for fossils in the desert. Story two is about a German paleontologist, Ernst Stromer, who explored the same ground almost a century ago but lost all his records and fossils when the Allies bombed Munich in World War II.

The Stromer saga is by far the more fascinating, but it is subjugated by the academic hubris of the modern-day scientists and relegated to second-class status until the very end. Unfortunately, "Lost Dinosaurs" plays like one of those "Dateline NBC" pieces that should end after 10 minutes but goes on and on and on for the entire hour because the producers didn't have any other stories that day. It also has elements of MTV's "The Real World" because most of the scientists happen to be in their 20s and do cool things like ride skateboards to work and use foul language when sand gets in their eyes.

As a half-hour special, it could have been a significant addition to the paleontological archive. At two hours, it's gift-shop bric-a-brac and a cynical demonstration of the apparent belief among programmers that, if it's about Egypt, we will watch.